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Fine, let’s write about the stupid Banana gameSaps a-peel
Saps a-peel
Image credit:Sky
Image credit:Sky
You might have noticed that the secondmost played gameon Steam right now is Banana, which released back in April, but has seen an explosion of popularity over the past couple of weeks. What is Banana? It’s a free idle clicker in which you click on a picture of a banana to make numbers go up. If the number goes up enough, the game drops additional pictures of bananas into your Steam inventory. Actually, it’s not even an idle clicker - simply leaving the game open all day is enough to generate a slow but steady supply of these banana pictures.
It’s the trading element, of course, that underpins the Banana game’s popularity - this and a dollop of FOMO, a love of shiny objects, and a faint hope, especially among despairing video games journalists, that Banana might turn out to be something more than it is. To their credit, the game’s creators aren’t making any grandioseCuriosity-Cube-esque promises. One of the devs, Hery, has openly described Banana as “a legal ‘Infinite money glitch’” in conversation withPolygon.
As you might expect of a legal infinite money glitch, Banana has a massive botting problem, and Hery is bracingly upfront about this too. “Since the game takes basically one percent to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to 1000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk,” they told Polygon. At one point last week, around 94,000 of the game’s approximately 141,000 players were bots. Today, the game peaked at 875,542 users.
The developers say they’re trying to get Valve to clamp down on the bots, but it seems obvious to me that Banana was designed with this outcome in mind. There have been arguments that Banana is an outright scam of some kind - I’m not sure it fits any particular legal definition, but with its appetisingly naff fruit designs and promise of instant wealth, it’s certainly geared to reel in the kind of player who falls victim to scams. It’s no huge surprise that one of its creators, Theselions, has been involved in dodgy cryptocurrency shenanigans, though Banana itself doesn’t appear to run off the blockchain.
Update 20th June 2024: Did I write “that’s pretty much all there is to know about Banana”? That was before I watchedJauwn’s deep dive into its workings and origins, which makes clear that the whole thing is shady as hell. Stay away. Thanks KDR_11k for passing it on.
